What he hated most was fetching the missed shots back to their launch site.
The comparison with death was incorrect — inadequate — inaccurate, because the fear in question was for life itself — life — human life was the threat: multitudinous, voracious, persistent, pitiless as a plague … of army ants … Japanese beetles … of locusts, the insect Joseph Skizzen thought we most resembled; yes, it spread itself out, life did, and assumed the shape of a swarm. We devoured one another, then the world, and we were many … many; we darkened even the day sky; our screams resembled stridulations. The professor could have howled like Mr. Hyde. There he was … there … seeing himself in his shaving glass. He took inadequate aim. He altered, yet he remained he. Austrian to a T. Mustached. Goateed.
One’s concern that the human race might not endure has been succeeded by the fear it will survive.
“One”? A word that distanced responsibility. A cowardly word, “one.” Why not another number? Why not the can in a corner pocket? “It” … “it” was the concern of not one but three monkeys, or was “it” that of “sixty-five”? “Five hundred thirty-two citizens of Oakland, California, said they were worried that their neighbors might survive the next fire.” A cowardly word, “one,” because it refused to choose: anybody, whoever, what’s the diff? Okay, so perhaps write “our worry” instead. What did the pen — the page — the sentence think? Yes, the difference between “concern” and “worry,” “worry” and “fear,” “fear” and “apprehension,” “anxiety” and “unease,” must be respected — represented.
Professor Skizzen made his way slowly toward the north end of the attic where cans that missed their cardboard goal could be found. On the way back he would imagine he was a damp dog and shake his sentence free from his wet ruff. Then he would kick that damn thing through the wall.
If “one” was merely an elision whose omitted matter might be restored, would sense be thereby achieved? By substituting “Someone’s concern that the human race …”? perhaps “Anyone’s concern that the human race …”? or “No one’s concern that the human race …”? Absurd. Absurd. You will never understand this language. Skizzen spoke aloud in his own space. You will never understand this language, even though it is your nearly native tongue.
The dent in the side of the can fit his shoe. He had nearly kicked one curve through its converse. There were two others, somewhere, under the slanting roof. Now and then their bruised aluminum would wink.
One’s worry that the human race might not endure has been succeeded by the fear it will survive.
Not yet. “Worry” was the wrong word. Too busy. Too ordinary. Too trivial. White rabbits worry. White rabbits dither. White rabbits scurry. Moreover, “our” was the opposite of “one.” “Our” was complicit and casually cozy. Who else has had this problem? This worry? Is it widespread enough to justify “our”? Possibly only Professor Joseph Skizzen owned up to it. The professor wasn’t wide; was short, slim, trim, fit, firm of tummy; wore a small sharp beard upon his chin below a thin precise line; and was quite noticeably alone in his opinions.
“Concern” suggested a state maintained with some constancy in our consciousness like low heat under a pan. When we worry, our thoughts rush hither and yon and then thither again like Alice’s rabbit. But when we are concerned, our thoughts sit quietly in a large chair and weigh the seat, configure the bottom of their bowl. Strictly speaking, though the designations are often misused, we can properly worry only about ourselves; language allows us, however, to have concerns for others. And he, Joseph Skizzen, as well as the rest of us alive right now, wouldn’t be around for Armageddon when it came, in any case. So not to worry.
An important kick was coming up. Keep it low. The box lay on its side and yawned.
Nevertheless, it would be prudent to remain concerned. For, like death, IT would come: Armageddon. There would be — without exaggeration — a series of catastrophes. As a consequence of the evil in man … —no mere virus, however virulent, was even a burnt match for our madness, our unconcern, our cruelty— … there would arise a race of champions, predators of humans: namely earthquakes, eruptions, tidal waves, tornados, typhoons, hurricanes, droughts — the magnificent seven. Floods, winds, fires, slides. The classical elements, only angry. Oceans would warm, the sky boil and burn, the ice cap melt, the seas rise. Rogue nations, like kids killing kids at their grammar school, would fire atomic — hydrogen — neutron bombs at one another. Smallpox would revive, or out of the African jungle would slide a virus no one understood. Though reptilian only in spirit, the disease would make us shed our skins like snakes and, naked to the nerves, we’d expire in a froth of red spit. Markets worldwide would crash as reckless cars on a speedway do, striking the wall and rebounding into one another, hurling pieces of themselves at the spectators in the stands. With money worthless — that last faith lost — the multitude would riot, race against race at first, God against God, the gots against the gimmes. Insects hardened by generations of chemicals would consume our food, weeds smother our fields, fire ants, killer bees sting us while we’re fleeing into refuge water, where, thrashing, we would drown, our pride a sodden wafer. Pestilence. War. Famine. A cataclysm of one kind or another — coming — making millions of migrants. Wearing out the roads. Foraging in the fields. Looting the villages. Raping boys and women. There’d be no tent cities, no Red Cross lunches, hay drops. Deserts would appear as suddenly as patches of crusty skin. Only the sun would feel their itch. Floods would sweep suddenly over all those newly arid lands as if invited by the beach. Forest fires would burn, like those in coal mines, for years, uttering smoke, making soot of speech, blackening every tree leaf ahead of their actual charring. Volcanoes would erupt in series, and mountains melt as though made of rock candy till the cities beneath them were caught inside the lava flow where they would appear to later eyes, if there were any eyes after, like peanuts in brittle. May earthquakes jelly the earth, Professor Skizzen hotly whispered. Let glaciers advance like motorboats, he bellowed, threatening a book with his fist. These convulsions would be a sign the parasites had killed their host, evils having eaten all they could; we’d hear a groan that was the going of the Holy Ghost; we’d see the last of life pissed away like beer from a carouse; we’d feel a shudder move deeply through this universe of dirt, rock, water, ice, and air, because after its long illness the earth would have finally died, its engine out of oil, its sky of light, winds unable to catch a breath, oceans only acid; we’d be witnessing a world that’s come to pieces bleeding searing steam from its many wounds; we’d hear it rattling its atoms around like dice in a cup before spilling randomly out through a split in the stratosphere, night and silence its place — well — not of rest — of disappearance. My wish be willed, he thought. Then this will be done, he whispered so no God could hear him. That justice may be served, he said to the four winds that raged in the corners of his attic.